AN EXTRAORDINARY SPEECH.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8223, 29 August 1906, Page 7

AN EXTRAORDINARY SPEECH.

An extraordinary speech, of three hours' duration, was delivered in the Federal House of Representatives on the Bth August by Mr King O'Malley, a Tasmanian representative. It was during the debate on the financial statement, and hai evidently been elaborately prepared, and was enriched with long quotations from various souroee, but it was not taken seriously. It consisted first of a denunciation of militarism, and chiefly an attack on "the gold basis." Ninety-five percent, of the community, he declared, lived on credit; and why not the Commonwealth? His peroration, delivered to a titterinc audience in an extravagant declamatory style, is thus reported in the official record: —"Let us not forget that Rome fell, Carthage fell, and Greece fell. Whilst they are gone, we are here! Not a broken arch, not a prostrate column, not a crumbling capital, in all the drifting shoals of antiquity,/ but witness these truths. A hundred flourishing empires first exalted, then humiliated, conquered, and oast down, teach men that the laws of nature and nature's God may not be violated with impunity. The stony lips of yon Egyptian sphinx which keeps its silent vigils over the sepulchral valley of the Nile, onoe the home of so many millions full of life and hope and energythere buried, kindred, name, and memory; engulphed and swallowed for ever in that awful winding-sheet of sand out of which those mighty pyramids rose, each one an imperishable monument to the tyranny of ancient rulers—repeat to all subsequent ages the folly of wasting tlie energies cf millions to subserve the pleasures and passions of the privileged few."